Playboy 1962

THE BLOODY PULPS nostalgia By CHARLES BEAUMONT in the days of our youth they were not deemed good reading and to us at the time they weren’t good, they were great PLAYBOY, September 1962 2 THERE WAS A RITUAL. potent literary drug known to boy, and all of us It was dark and mysterious, as rituals ought to suffer withdrawal symptoms to this day. No one be, and—for those who enacted it—a holy and ever kicked the pulps cold turkey. They were too enchanted thing. powerful an influence. Instead, most of us tried to If you were a prepubescent American male in the ease off. Having dreamed of owning complete sets, Twenties, the Thirties or the Forties, chances are in mint condition, of all the pulp titles ever you performed the ritual. If you were a little too published, and having realized perhaps a tenth part tall, a little too short, a little too fat, skinny, pimply, of the dream—say, 1500 magazines, or a an only child, painfully shy, awkward, scared of bedroomful—we suffered that vague disen- girls, terrified of bullies, poor at your schoolwork chantment that is the first sign of approaching (not because you weren’t bright but because you maturity (16, going on 17, was usually when it wouldn’t apply yourself), uncomfortable in large happened) and decided to be sensible. Accordingly, crowds, given to brooding, and totally and we stopped buying all the new mags as fast as they overwhelmingly convinced of your personal could appear, and concentrated instead upon a few inadequacy in any situation, then you certainly indispensable items. Gradually we cut down until performed it. we were keeping up the files on only three or four, Which is to say, you worshiped at the shrine of or possibly five or six, publications. After a few the pulps. years, when we had left high school, we got the What were the pulps? number down to two. Which is where most of us Cheaply printed, luridly illustrated, sensationally stand today. We don’t read the magazines, of written magazines of fiction aimed at the lower and course. But we go on buying them. Not regularly, lower-middle classes. and not in any sense because we want to, but Were they any good? No. They were great. because we must. It is an obligation, a duty, to the Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Spider, G-8 and bright untroubled selves we were. To plunge any His Battle Aces, The Phantom, Adventure, Argosy, further into adulthood would be an act of betrayal. Blue Book, Black Mask, Thrilling Wonder Stories, But the times have betrayed us, anyway. The Marvel Tales—and all the hundred-and-one other pulps, as we knew and loved them, are gone. The titles that bedizened the newsstands of America in gaudy, gory covers, the dramatic interior the halcyon days—provided ecstasy and euphoria illustrations, the machine-gun prose, the rough, of a type unknown to this gloomy generation. They rich-smelling, wood-chip-speckled paper—all gone. made to crawl deliciously young scalps. They The so-called “pulps” of 1962 are nothing of the inspired, excited, captivated, hypnotized—and, kind. They are slickly printed, slickly written unexpectedly, instructed—the reckless young who echoes of their own great past. Look at Argosy now, have become responsible adults. Of course, they and then think of the magazine as it was when H. were infra dig. In line with the imperishable Bedford-Jones and A. Hyatt Verrill and Arthur Leo American concept that anything that is purely Zagat were waging their bloody Mongol wars; pick enjoyable must be a sin, the pulps were considered up the diminutive, pocket-size, lightweight sinful. Although they were, at their worst (or best), Amazing Stories and try to imagine it 20 years ago fractionally as “objectionable” as the immoral, when its special quarterly edition was the size of a amoral, violent, perverted product available dictionary (unabridged) and more exciting than a nowadays to any tennis-shoe-shod sub-teen who ride in a roller coaster. Buy one of these has the price of admission to a movie theater or emasculated ghosts and display it on a subway. access to a television set, they were proscribed by Wait for the frowns, and go on waiting forever— most parents and all educators. Thus we indulged in there won’t be any. The “pulps” are now socially them in much the same way that we indulged in the acceptable, and I can think of no greater damnation other purely enjoyable facts of life. Which was an of them. altogether agreeable state of affairs. Fortunately, the Only the well-remembered “eight-pagers” (Toots psychologists of the day did not understand the and Casper, Dick Tracy, etc.) carried a greater special sweetness of the stolen watermelon. So they stigma than the old-time adventure magazines. denounced the pulps, wrote tracts on the fearful Happily, no sober, critical evaluation of pulps is consequences certain to befall those whose minds possible. Like any other narcotic, they defy rational were polluted by “the newsstand trash” and analysis. One can speak of their effects, even of otherwise did their best to create a nation of their ingredients, but not—without wearisome and addicts. unconvincing pomposity—of their causes. Addicts we certainly were. We gave ourselves Something in them froze the addict’s critical over wholly to the habit and pursuit of the most faculties. He might entertain a difference of opinion PLAYBOY, September 1962 3 on the relative merits of Putnam’s translation of god: lithe, sinewy, powerful. Nor was this a happy Don Quixote as opposed to Shelton’s, but on the accident of nature, but, rather, the result of rigid subject of Weird Tales he was, and is, adamant. discipline. The Doc Savage Plan of Living was Reacting with typically honest fury to criticism eventually made available to the general readership, of one of his favorite pulp writers, the eminent “in answer to innumerable requests.” However, the regional novelist and historian August Derleth editor warned us that: “Important as these exercises wrote not too long ago: “With that sublime, may be, and as much as they may accomplish in egocentric stupidity which characterizes a certain building you up physically, mentally and morally, subspecies of frustrate which goes in for book they should be only the basis for bigger things in reviewing in order to find some compensation for life.” What bigger things the editor had in mind, we its own singular lack of creative ability by did not know. If through the Plan of .Living we deprecating the work of those who are creative, a attained the abilities of Doc Savage (and the reviewer recently brushed aside a book of implication was that we would), then we must be supernatural tales as being, after all, ‘only pulp- equal to anything, for the Man of Bronze was even fiction.’ The reviewer offered no evidence of being more accomplished than any of his five assistants— able to say just what stigma attached to writing for and they were the best in the world: the so-called ‘pulp’ magazines.” Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks, Of course the reviewer who enraged Derleth “Ham” for short, Harvard Law School’s most could not have been an addict, so he ought to be distinguished graduate and America’s best-dressed forgiven; particularly in that, no matter what he man, who carried a natty black cane within which said, he was probably right. To the hooked, those nestled a slender sword tipped with a mysterious wild and wonderful stories were all great; to the sleep-inducing drug developed by: unhooked (a state of being difficult for the hooked Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett “Monk” to imagine), they were no doubt dreadful, hardly to Mayfair, one of the world’s greatest chemists, a be classed as literature. shy, gentle, squeaky-voiced man with the build of a It is true that they were unlike any other gorilla and the tenacity of a scorpion; literature to which we had been exposed. Before Colonel John Renwick, engineer extraordinary, our encounters with Black Mask and similar whose gallon-pail fists came in handy whenever a periodicals, we tended to think of adventures as thick door panel needed smashing in; belonging to a previous age. Buccaneers. Indians, Major Thomas J. “Long Tom” Roberts, an Frontier Fighters, Soldiers of Fortune—all were in electrical wizard, sturdy of mind, frail of physique; the past, we thought. Then we read the pulps and And, far from least, the archeologist and learned that adventure surrounded us, that danger geologist, William Harper Littlejohn, whose was omnipresent, evil a threat to be countered at all specialty was the English language. He would have odds, and science not a laboratory curiosity but, sent us all scurrying to our dictionaries had not instead, an active tool. We learned a lot of other author Kenneth Robeson thoughtfully translated his things, too, including the quaint but useful lesson transcendental philological peregrinations. (As it that it is more rewarding to be a good guy than a was, “Johnny” did contribute importantly to our bad guy. vocabularies. For a time we all used his colorful Take Doc Savage (as we did, in large uncut substitute for profanity: “I’ll be super- doses). Here truly was a worthwhile idol, a man amalgamated!”) among men. His admirers called him “The Mental With this fabulous confederacy of adventurers, Marvel,” “The Scientific Genius,” “The Muscular headed always by Clark Savage, Jr., M.D. Midas.” His enemies called him “The Yankee (specializing in brain surgery when he was not Menace.” He fought on the side of Right, inspiring fighting the International Cartels of Evil), we fear and respect in those who would threaten the traveled under the earth’s surface, beneath the sea, U.S.

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